father who had been the religious one, but with his fatherâs death his mother seemed to have taken up the religious part, and she talked about the church she went to. They werenât demonstrative with each other.
The lectures and demonstrations about how to take histories, how to listen down a stethoscope, how to elicit a reflex kick by tapping a tendon in the patientâs knee with a patella hammer, were finished. The students each joined a firm. The head of the firm was a consultant, below him a registrar, below him, the houseman, below him, half a dozen students. Georgeâs firm was neurology. The studentsâ job was to take histories when new patients were admitted, visit the neurology patients as they sat in their beds, make sure charts were up to date, report changes to the houseman, sit in on outpatient clinics, and each lunchtime attend a post-mortem, which was performed by the consultant pathologist. But the students were not on call all night as were the housemen. They did not have to go without sleep. Georgeâs evenings and weekends were still his own.
Sometimes at the end of a day, George would go for a drink with two or three other students. He stayed close to Peter Bailiss, who seemed to have reconstituted Cambridge in Whitehall. Some evenings George would phone his mother to say he wouldnât be home until late. Heâd sit up into the night with a group of Peterâs colleagues, talking as they had at Trinity.
He kept in touch, too, with Douglas Hinton, who had started his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, with a junior fellowship and rooms in Kingâs. One Saturday at the beginning of November, George took the train to Cambridge, and slept on the couch in Douglasâs sitting room.
âYou can come any time,â said Douglas. âI donât think oneâs supposed to have people to stay, but Iâm on good terms with the bedder. She wonât say anything.â
George felt nostalgic for Cambridge. Leytonstone seemed a poor exchange.
âYou went to Germany in the summer,â said Douglas. âHow was it?â
âBerlin was fine,â said George. âToo many men in uniform for my taste, but they donât bother you.â
âAfter Christmas, Iâm going to Würzburg for a couple of months. Thereâs a technique Iâve got to learn there.â
Most evenings George went back to the house in Leytonstone and ate with his mother before going up to his attic rooms. He thought he and his mother had become like an old married couple for whom everything except mealtimes had fallen away. It would have been better to live closer to town, but this was cheaper and it wasnât bad. Having him in the house seemed to be enough for his mother, and because â he thought â she felt he was doing the right thing, moving up in the world to become a doctor, she was less critical of him than she had been when he was younger. She seemed, even, to think of him as an adult.
For George and Anna, it was love at a distance. They wrote each weekend, so that each could look forward to the arrival of a letter during the week.
In his fourth letter, George wrote that his short story about the old man who had nearly been knocked over, and the dissection room, had been accepted for a magazine.
In December Anna travelled to London, to stay with George. He was anxious about her coming to stay in his motherâs house.
âWill it be all right if Anna stays here?â he said.
âWhy should it not be?â said his mother.
Georgeâs mother was not much of a one for jokes, but he saw she was teasing. He was grateful that she seemed not to be taking her religion too far.
âShe can stay in my room, upstairs,â said George.
âThere are no children in the house.â
When Anna arrived, Georgeâs mother was polite to her, even welcoming.
George was embarrassed to invite Anna to his attic room with its bed, its two
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